AFTER SOLARIS
In dialogue with Fu Liang
FVTVRIST Magazine // October 12, 2025
FVTVRIST meets Chinese contemporary artist Fu Liang in Paris, following his solo exhibition After Solaris with LINSEED Gallery at Frieze Seoul 2025. Known for reinterpreting Tarkovsky’s iconic meditation on memory, desire, and the unknowable, Fu Liang transforms these cosmic and psychological themes through painting, sculpture, and the use of pigment and form. In his Paris studio, the artist spoke about his experience exhibiting internationally and about living between China and Europe, where he continues to navigate the paradox of freedom and constraint. Presenting a new body of work, Fu Liang left us with a resonant question that defines the next chapter of his practice: what comes after Solaris?
Portrait of Fu Liang. © Photo Jérémy Beaudet
After Solaris takes its name from Tarkovsky’s meditation on memory, desire, and the unknowable. What drew you to this film as a conceptual anchor, and how do you reinterpret its cosmic and psychological themes through your own materials and forms?
The way the characters in the film change their emotional perceptions after their living environment shifts, and how this connects us to existence itself and the cosmos, made me decide to use this work as a lens through which to experiment with my paintings and sculptures. My practice is always tied to the environment in which I live, and to the shifting perceptions and awareness I experience at different moments in time.
Minerals, graphite, and cosmic imagery become both medium and metaphor in your work. How do you see the relationship between the mineral body and the human body, between matter and consciousness?
Matter is something tangible, while consciousness is an absent presence. I am exploring how minerals can provide a way to discuss existence, making consciousness almost parasitic on the concreteness of matter. Minerals appear and transform everywhere in our lives: the stars we see in the night sky are mineral bodies, as are the moon, other planets, and stalactite caves. Their existence far outlasts ours, eternal and enduring, while our presence seems fragile and fleeting. When I gaze up at the stars in nature, I often reflect on how small our existence is within the vastness of the cosmos.
Your practice often navigates the dialectics of being and non-being, presence and absence. How do these philosophical concerns translate into the very materiality of your paintings and sculptures?
When I work with painting, I begin by stretching canvas and preparing it with rabbit-skin glue—boiled, applied, and dried until it becomes completely transparent. Layer after layer of paint gradually covers and erases brushstrokes. These repetitive, even monotonous preparations always make me reflect on the ritual-like philosophy of painting. In this series, I depicted many suspended moments within movement, and I dye printed mineral pigments onto canvas to form images. In sculpture, I carved raw mineral stones into star-shaped constellations. Although both use mineral materials, they speak two different languages: one through painting, the other through sculpture. In this way, minerals make the abstract terms of presence and absence more tangible.
You have spoken of loneliness and warmth, fear and hope, dualities that define the diasporic condition. How has living in Paris shaped the emotional and intellectual registers of your work?
I think those who live as immigrants all have a deeper understanding of these words. In Paris, an international metropolis, diversity and anonymity create the kind of living environment I had long desired. As an immigrant, it is inevitable to encounter and even clash with global politics, which pushes me to consider how my work relates to current contexts. Living in a cultural capital, where I can see extraordinary exhibitions every year, has also been an exciting and enriching experience for a young artist. Such life experiences make my perspective distinct from living in other countries.
FU Liang, A Quiet Collapse, 2025, Oil and mineral pigment on canvas, 200 x 230cm.
© FU Liang – Courtesy of the Artist and LINSEED
How does this inheritance of Chinese historical aesthetics continue to inform your artistic language today?
I studied calligraphy when I was a kid, but after one semester my teacher told my family I was not suited for it. Yet I was fascinated by preparing the ink before practice: grinding an ink stick with water in a clockwise motion to turn clear liquid into matte black. This process, along with the smell of ink, enchanted me. In traditional Chinese painting, whether on silk or in calligraphy, mineral pigments are widely used. I see the use of such materials as an invisible cultural signifier. Chinese poetry also thrives on metaphor, and this language of metaphor continues to shape how I think about images and materials in my practice.
As a Chinese artist in Europe, do you feel liberated or limited, and how does that affect how your work is received?
Neither China nor Europe offers absolute freedom or absolute constrain, each place brings its own limits and liberties. Perhaps living between two cultures allows me to experience a degree of freedom that comes from navigating both. In terms of visibility, after graduating from art school I quickly had many international exhibition opportunities outside France, but it was only two years later that French institutions began to take an interest in my work. Of course, everyone’s trajectory is different.
From Mallorca to other residencies, how do the places you inhabit (landscapes and cultures) leave a mark on your work?
During my residency on the island, I spent a lot of time in close contact with nature. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I communicated in English, an environment that felt both strange and familiar gave me more time to reflect on my feelings within nature. The island was full of mineral caves, sandy beaches, volcanic stones, and fragile aquatic life I observed while diving, all of which made me think about human fragility in relation to environment. I also visited the Miró Foundation, and observing the details of his studio felt like glimpsing the details of his working process. The way he related the color blue to the night sky, and transformed sails into symbols in his paintings, gave me a more personal understanding of his life and practice. During the residency I also collected local minerals and ground them into pigments for my paintings.
How do Chinese and European galleries, and their audiences, differ in the way they receive your work?
Our understanding of things is grounded in lived experience. Different cultures bring different insights into my work, and it is precisely this diversity of perception that I hope to receive as feedback after completing a piece. For example, I once created 165 ceramic leaves with a metallic glaze that made the fragile material appear hard. European audiences reflected on the tension between fragility and hardness, while Chinese viewers asked whether I was alluding to the idiom “fallen leaves return to their roots,” metaphorically questioning how, in old age, one returns to their place of origin. I think such questions are those all immigrants face: where are our roots, and how do we define where we come from?
FU Liang, Drowned in Soft Waves, 2025, Oil and mineral pigment on canvas, 100 x 80cm. © FU Liang – Courtesy of the Artist and LINSEED
IN THE STUDIO, THE WORK EXISTS AS A QUIET IMAGE. BUT IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE, IT BECOMES ACTIVATED. I HOPE IT CONVEYS AN INNER RHYTHM AND RESONANCE, THOUGH I CANNOT DETERMINE HOW EACH VIEWER WILL PERCEIVE IT. FOR EXAMPLE, DURING AN EXHIBITION IN KOREA, I WAS DELIGHTED TO HEAR DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS: SOME FOUND THE WORK FRIGHTENING, OTHERS SAW AN APOCALYPTIC AESTHETIC, OR CONNECTED IT TO COSMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS LIKE THE BIG BANG.
What is next After Solaris?
Lately I have been contemplating the bond between shells, space, and detachment.
FIN
About Fu Liang
FU Liang was born in Sichuan, China in 1993. He received his BFA in 2019 and MFA in 2021 from the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Art, France. He currently lives and works in Paris. Fu’s work, with an intricate interplay of rich textures, corporeal forms, and geographical landscapes, embodies subtle access to a series of perceptions, emotions, memories, and knowledge. Rooted in a familial legacy of antique connoisseurship, Fu’s artistic vision is enriched by a deep-seeded understanding of historical aesthetics. Delving deep into diferent modes of material transformation, his experimental use of mineral pigments and other raw materials resonates with his philosophical contemplation on the passage of time and the gradual change of life as a part of the organic and sometimes mystical ecology. By often employing the figural as a rhetorical device with a warm, intimate, and gentle touch, Fu’s practice explores the synthetic relationship between the seen and the unseen, the presence and absence, and the being and non-being.
